Roll: Primary work?

Review: Too much information!

Next Time:

• Cabeza de Vaca

• Smith

• Frethorne

• Response essays: Groups 4 & 5

• Abstract: Christina Shortt

Quick Review

• Responses to form– Priscilla: How do we interpret Genesis? Why

trust it? What are its sources?

– Dan: “literary hot dog” -- marginalia

– Emily: mysterious appearance – curious want to read & understand

From “the literacy myth”

• Critical literacy – questions contexts, sources

• No “free reading” or independent interpretation

• Attitudes toward form & content of texts are learned

Brittany:

• Response to content

• Power & authority– Competing forces– Choices– Consequences of choices

• Self-fashioning

• Zuni creation account– Compare Zuni account to Geneva account

– Use intro to help

– How do appearance & content make you feel & why?

• Columbus’s journals– Who are his authority figures?

– What are his sources of knowledge?

– How does his writing reflect the Geneva Bible?

– Would you want to be at a party with him? Why?

Creation & Emergence Accounts

Function (Wiget, pp. 19-20)

• Explain how things came to be, from chaos to order

• Provide structure of worship rituals, such as sacrifice

• Describe relationship between divine, humans, and animals

• Provide traditions of community

• Provide communal system of governance

• Provide worldview

Your responses?

• P. 23 repetition

• P. 25 symbolic time

• Pp. 30-31 incest & division

• P. 36 itiwana -- centering

Beginnings: Similarities and DifferencesForm

• signals of orality

• Graff’s literacy myth

Content (Wiget, pp. 20-21)

• hierarchy & sin

• centering & Itiwana vs. dislocation

Function

• civilization & order

• provide tradition

• explain emergence, existence of humans & other life

• development of civilization

• development of rituals

• humans’ relation to deities

Content• both provide belief in possible renewal or rebirth• Judeo-Christian account emphasizes displacement or

dislocation, transcendent deity, ever-present gap because of sin

• Zuni emphasizes wholeness in the here and now at the “center,” at Itiwana

• both present their people as the chosen ones – ethnocentrism – Mexicans (mixed Spanish & natives) and Ishmaelites; outward signs such as circumcision distinguish the “elect” from the “other”

The Writing Subject & The Writing Subject’s Community

•Columbus’s journals– Who are his authority figures?– What are his sources of knowledge?– How does his writing reflect the Geneva Bible?– Would you want to be at a party with him? Why?

What do you know about the author by examining his writing?

Your Responses

Columbus, from First Voyage(transcribed by Bartolemé de las Casas)

- descriptive listing : encyclopedic nature

- “your highnesse”: audience & purpose

- natives’ nakedness, paint, perceptions of whites, no

religion: resource

- taking plants & people:resource

Columbus, from Third Voyage

The world is described

as pear-shaped, in spite

of ptolemic theories and

the placement of the

Garden of Eden.

What do

we make of this?

Self-Fashioning

• From Stephen Greenblatt

• Occurs through writing

• Authorities

• Aliens

• Tension within writer

• Aliens threaten writer’s sense of self

• Writer admires but threatens authority

Next time:

• Cabeza de Vaca– Compare to Columbus– Apply “self-fashioning” theory

• Who are authorities? Aliens?

– Especially consider description of • Natives

• Natural World

• Other Europeans

Next time:• Smith’s three works

– Apply “self-fashioning”– How does he appear in each work?– How does his appearance change?– Consider form, content, function– Let intro help you

• Frethorne’s letters– Apply “self-fashioning”